Middle-of-the-road rage

I've arranged to see my old neighbours and chums Tim and John for a foaming pint at the Fox & Scrotum, the occasion being that it is now officially 100 years since I've been out on a Saturday night, unless you count going down to the washing line, which my wife seems to think is a job best done in the dark by someone with too exalted a sense of what weekends should be all about.

Anyway, it is a mark of my exceptional strategic daring that I am at the pub ahead of the other two, who have doubtless been held up at home pretending to load the dishwasher and making sure their own spouses are tucked up on the sofa with a suitable sedative to get them through the excitement of being left with John Nettles for the evening.

And I'm sure they won't mind if I start without them. But then it takes so long to get served in the little front bar, owing to a proliferation of yeasty ale buffs wearing big jumpers woven from actual hops and dithering over what density beer goes best with McCoy's overpriced crinkle-cut, lard-and-sawdust flavour crispy lino-remnants, that I decide to go for the live-music option in the back room, which is bound to be completely empty if only because it is ominously free to get in. Sure enough, there are only a handful of people in there - most of them making no attempt to disguise their obvious family resemblance to the band, who in turn seem as happy to get pints down their necks and horse around as plug their instruments in with a view to doing something remotely entertaining for the rest of us. I ask the man in the T-shirt what time it starts. 'Eight o'clock,' he says, cheerfully failing to note the discrepancy between that statement and the time now according to Accurist (ie 17 minutes past).

I sit down, pointedly looking at my watch. More people drift in. I kill time by filling in the questionnaires that the record company have left all over the place, chuckling to myself as I imagine their shock when they discover how many of the audience live in designer hotels and spend much of their disposable income on Chas and Dave albums. Days go by. I check my watch again. A spider wanders up and down the wall. I pretend to be interested in beermats. One of the roadies tries to lower audience expectations by playing a bongo drum.

At last the band shamble on and launch into their first number, which immediately pronounces them to be one of those drony, acoustic combos who see it as a moral duty to emote misery, helplessness, problem hair and low self-esteem. I don't know what I expected but I do find myself marvelling at the way a fun-loving, post-adolescent foursome can be transformed into such emotional wrecks simply by strapping guitars on. It has to be said that all the songs are uncannily similar, as the gang gamely stave off cheerfulness with much inadvisable wailing and deployment of doomy chord changes. I am about to call the Samaritans for all of us when Tim and John breeze in, and about time.

They sit down. I tell them how great the band is, but they are soon visibly wincing at the singer's vocal range, which in carpet-fitting terms is a foot shorter than the melody, especially during the quieter, fiddly bits round the fireplace.

John inevitably drifts into a conversation with Tim about bicycles. Astonishingly it turns out they are both in the middle of quite different books about the Tour de France! John says he has special rollers that enables him to cycle hundreds of miles in the front room while watching a video of the Pyrenees flashing by. Tim has something to say about saddles. I harbour secret fears that cycling may be the new oral sex and that I am too set in my ways to be receptive to its pleasures.

'Gonna do a song now called "The Dark Reaper",' the singer says, as a prelude to the band getting itself into a lather about alienation, man's unsuitability to exist and people jumping over cliffs.